The Americans who died for Canada in WWII finally get their due

WASHINGTON—Richard
Fuller Patterson was a strapping young flyer with a world of promise
when he died, alone and forgotten, almost 72 years ago in the cockpit of
his Spitfire.

Shot down over Belgium
at age 26, with a Canadian insignia on his arm and his American
citizenship in doubt. That’s how the end came for this graduate of
Princeton and Harvard Law School.

Patterson was an heir
to a name that still means something in Virginia: the Pattersons of
Richmond founded the iconic Lucky Strike tobacco brand that the whole
world, it seemed, was smoking during the Second World War. “Fuller,” as
the charismatic fighter pilot was known, was the golden boy.

He was also a
gun-jumper: one of the more than 840 American volunteers who would not
wait until their country joined the war against Hitler. Instead, they
put their passports on the line, joining, training — and, eventually,
dying — as members of the Royal Canadian Air Force....